Return to Vancouver, Part 1: What to Leave In, What to Leave Out

In March, after a dull day in Kingston, Lin said, “If PAL Vancouver calls tomorrow, tell them we’ll take it.” I laughed. We’d been on their waiting list for 14 years, and had never heard from them. The next day, PAL called: an apartment was available. PAL is a Performing Arts Lodge: an apartment building with subsidized rents, mostly for older folks who’d wasted their lives in the arts and never made much money. Because we’d wasted half our lives in the arts and spent half making modest amounts as a publicist (Lin) and teacher (me), we qualified for a less subsidized but manageable rent – and in the most beautiful real estate in the world: at the entrance to Stanley Park. But when PAL did call, the first thing we said was, “We’re not doing this, are we?” “Nope.” It was too much work, exchanging our big, four-bedroom Kingston house, crammed with decades’ worth of stuff, for a one-bedroom flat without enough space for the two of us. But then we talked all afternoon about it. Were we being lazy? Cowardly? We’d both complained that our lives in retirement weren’t interesting enough. We’d contemplated different scenarios, including other PALs